That’s good, he said. The idiomatic particulars should be as evocative as possible, but beware of fictionalized sociological findings. Remember the great allegories about “everyman” and Pilgrim’s Progress is about everyman who—who would become whatever. Let us not forget Rake’s Progress.
Anyway, he continued as we headed for the door, this is all good news, and I don’t have to tell you how pleased I am to have had anything whatsoever to do with you two becoming the kind of, what shall I say, collegial friends you have become.
And when Estelle Poindexter, who was walking arm in arm with Eunice, said, Spoken in parchment with the Honors Day enthusiasm of a certified and formally berobed Prof Dex if I ever heard one, he said, So, flip your tassels across your mortarboards.
XXVI
When we came downstairs to the cafeteria for breakfast that next morning, the main item on our agenda was what we were going to have to do to get settled into our on-campus apartment by that next Monday morning. It was now Thursday. Freshman students were already arriving, and general registration would begin Friday and end Saturday.
At that time there were five academic class days per week, with some courses meeting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and others on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My first classroom session would begin at eight o’clock on Monday. But on that first Monday morning there would be a faculty orientation session in the office of the English Department at seven-thirty. That was when you picked up your roster of registration enrollees, your attendance and performance record book, along with your first stack of publishers’ promotion copies of new and revised editions of textbooks and anthologies.
Meanwhile, the fall term of the county elementary school in which Eunice was going to be teaching would not begin until Monday of the week after the first week of classes on campus were under way. So according to the instructions she had received in New York along with her contract and other orientation data, all she had to do to arrange for commuter pickup transportation was call the telephone number provided along with the class schedule and give her name, address, and phone number, and the dispatcher would call her back and give the time to be ready to be picked up.
Given the school’s widely celebrated emphasis on good housekeeping and also as returning graduates, we were not surprised to find that our on-campus apartment was as suitable and well furnished as it was. All we had to do before that next Monday was to arrange for the books and other items we had shipped from New York to be delivered from local railway express, and shop for provisions for the kitchen and items for the bathroom.
From the window at the end of the living room where the executive-size desk was, you could see the valley and the trees, beyond which were the clock tower, the promenade lawn, and the dome of the dining hall, which you could not see. The other end of the living room could be converted into a dining area by expanding and raising the coffee table. And when you stepped into the hallway from the living room, the bath and bedroom were on your left, and the kitchen with a breakfast nook was on your right.
Before sundown that Thursday we had received all of our deliveries and also completed our shopping, so we checked out of the guesthouse that Friday morning, and by noon we felt that we were ready to take off and have a snack at the drugstore lunch counter on the off-campus main drag. And afterward, while Eunice went to look up some of her old instructors in the Department of Education, I would drop in on Red Gilmore in the Toggery and Deke Whatley in the barbershop to let them know that I was back in town for a year or maybe two.
Red Gilmore was busy with two customers, so all I did was slap palms with him and take a quick look around at his fall term display and point to the barbershop next door as I came back out onto the sidewalk.
Hey, here he is, Deke Whatley said as I came into the doorway and then into the lotion-, talcum-, and tobacco-scented ambience of the barbershop. He did not have a customer at the time, so he was sitting in his jacked-up chair facing the entrance with his legs crossed as he puffed and flourished his cigar exactly as I remembered him doing when I saw him for the first time during my freshman year.
Hey, what say there, young fella, he said, extending his hand. We’ve been hearing some pretty reliable rumors about you heading back down this way this term. Hey, y’all remember this boy. Came up here on one of them special scholarship deals from that school down around Mobile way. What say, my man? Look at him, y’all. Yeah, here he is.
They were all looking at me then, and when I pointed at Skeeter and said, Hey, I’ll be seeing you again at least for a while, he said, Man, you’ve been to a lot of super hip experts since the last time you were in this chair: Hollywood, Chicago, New York, and even all the way over to Paris, France.
And I said, Man, all I was ever looking for wherever I was, was somebody to keep it looking like you had it looking when I left here.
Of course, Deke Whatley said then, You must know who the main ones keeping me up on your doings and whereabouts was. Giles Cunningham. Y’all know that. Old Giles and Miss Lady took a liking to him. She was the one spotted him out at the Dolomite one night. Not because he was a musician, but because he was
